1. Read the text book, even if it's boring and even if you don't understand it, read it. You can read without understanding.
I strongly disagree with this. If you don't understand what you are reading then you won't be forming any associations or connections in your mind with regards to the material. Without at least some basic framework of understanding the information in the reading will simply not "stick" and you'll have completely forgotten it in a few hours.
2. Go to lecure and don't take notes. Instead keep your eyes on the professor's face the entire lecture. You will be amazed how much more you remember.
For some classes this might work but for most others it doesn't. In my linear algebra class I took a plethora of notes because of how densely packed the lectures were. From proofs to examples to definitions and ideas, I wrote it all down. In addition to providing a good foundation for doing the homework and studying for tests, by committing it to paper I was forced to see/hear the information, internalize it, and then redirect it back onto paper. Usually what I wrote was a condensed or summarized version often annotated with simple drawings or comments to indicate the connection with previous material. If I had just sat there staring at the professor I wouldn't have remembered anything.
3. Do the homework, even if it's repetitive and easy. It will save you study time later.
Agreed. I find it funny how many people go through courses like linear algebra or physics and expect to do well without doing any of the homework. That said, I don't care for courses where you don't have graded homework (or even hand it in) because it gives you zero feedback on your progress. There's no reason every course can't spare 10-20% of the overall grade to go towards homework credit. Even more important though, homework should be graded clearly and returned promptly. I get really pissed off after spending some 3-4 hours on an assignment and then not getting it back until 3 weeks later with nothing but a red checkmark at the top of the page.
4. Figure out the pattern your instructor uses to make test questions.
That does help, but it won't do much for you on the first exam. This also treads a little too close to "studying to get a good grade" instead of "studying to understand the material". I realize that getting good grades are important (even too important in many cases), but the whole point of being in school should be to learn. If you spend more time trying to figure out tricks to subvert an exam than you spend trying to learn you've already lost something significant.
This is a net-oriented device, afterall. If you want a full-fledged computer, then get a full-fledged computer. This sounds exactly like what a NETbook should do.
Except that netbooks are also designed to be ultra-portable. Unless you're always around an available wireless access point, not having office productivity software installed might be pretty annoying on that flight, bus trip, on the road, visiting family, etc.
If these NETbooks had some kind of always-available Internet access (say a 3G modem or something else) then I'd probably agree with you, but unfortunately lots of people use these devices while not online. I'm not sure this decision makes a lot of sense given the way the devices are actually used, their misleading name notwithstanding.
"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censored, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably." -- Judge Aaron Satie -- "Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
The quote in your message body and the quote in your.sig seem to go together in an oddly remarkable way. It's almost like some kind of Möbius strip of quotations.
Zero point six eight seconds, sir. For an android, that is nearly an eternity.
I've always wondered at this line of dialog. From Measure of a Man we know that Data's processing speed is "60 trillion operations per second". If we assume he dedicated his full attention to her offer for the entire 0.68 seconds, that's almost 41 trillion operations required to consider and eventually reject the offer.
If Picard ever stopped to think about it, I'd imagine that might begin to worry him...
Peanuts is still being published 10 years after the creator's death!
While I don't care for Peanuts very much, I'd rather have reruns of a classic comic than the absolute drivel that Garfield has been for the last 10 years. I can only fathom that A) newspapers can't find anything else to fill that space, or B) nobody dares get rid of such a "classic" strip like Garfield. Jim Davis doesn't even try to be funny anymore.
Of course no criticism of Garfield is complete without referencing both Garfield Minus Garfield and Garkov. The saddest part is that G-G is significantly funnier than the "legitimate" strips published every day and most of the time the Markov-generated strips in Garkov are indistinguishable from what Jim Davis writes.
I suppose this means that Jim Davis fails the Turing Test.
The difference between C and x86 assembly is like the difference between hiragana and kanji. You can write the same stuff with hiragana a lot easier, but you look like an idiot.
Disclaimer: I don't know anything about hiragana, and my only data point is a some guy on Slashdot that was talking about it.
If they are able to bypass the hypervisor and then do hack mods for the PS3 this might open up a whole new avenue for modders and interest in the platform that was not there before. In other words, this might not be a bad thing for the PS3 overall.
The problem with this is that Sony doesn't want you to buy a PS3 just so they can sell you the hardware. Sony wants you to buy a PS3 so they can sell you games, movies, downloadable content, accessories such as remotes and controllers, and other stuff like that. Large numbers of people running hacked and modded consoles that can use homebrew software and games, cracked/pirated games and downloads, and pirated BluRay movies and DVDs is the exact opposite of what Sony really wants to see happen.
As other pointed out, Halo was a huge part of the popularity of the Xbox and was, in fact, the initial reason I personally bought one. As useful as a modded Xbox is (games on the hard drive and XBMC especially), Microsoft doesn't like people modding the Xbox any more than Sony likes them modding the PS3. After all, there's a reason these companies invested what probably amounted to millions of dollars in the (doomed to fail) anti-tampering software and hardware which guards the platform.
I know it's bad form to reply to yourself, but really Slashdot? THAT is how you render an HTML ordered list? What blind, drunk monkey on an acid trip designed that stylesheet?
Of course the icing on the cake is that in the preview it was properly rendered as an ordered numeric list. WTF, Taco?
Oh, look at the name of the CSS files responsible: idlecore-tidied.css. Makes sense now I suppose. Anything to do with idle.slashdot is already horribly broken.
So, for all those tab fans, what is it about tabs that you find useful?
I can have my indent be 2 spaces and you can have it be 8 spaces, all without changing the source code.
Files are not constantly being changed and updated in the source control system due to the number of spaces changing as different developers edit the code.
If I want to print out a section of code, I can modify the tab/space equivalency so that the lines easily fit on the page without wrapping.
Tabs provide a one-to-one relationship between the level of indentation and the number of characters used. This isn't usually a big deal, but in terms of parsing and editing I personally find this more elegant than using spaces (an inconsistent many-to-one relationship).
It saves electrons. One tab character generally fills the shoes of four space characters. That's a savings of 75%! Smaller storage and transmission requirements means fewer servers in the datacenter which means less heat created which means smaller refrigeration units which means less energy consumed which means fewer greenhouse gases emitted which means less global warming which means continued survival of the human species.
So there you go. In addition to just being more manageable and flexible, using tabs over spaces will help ensure the future existence of the human species on this planet.
Okay, so while the last point was in jest (mostly;), I stand by the first four. Honestly, I've yet to see any pro-spaces people give any substantial reasons (when applied to modern computers and development tools) that spaces work better than tabs.
So, for all those space fans, what is it about spaces that you find useful?
Anyone who uses w3schools's browser stats as a reference for general browser usage needs to get knocked on the head a few times. That is a perfect example of biased results due to the nature of the sample.
I just wish the likes of Nobuo Uematsu, Martin O'Donnell, Michael Salvatori, James Horner and the like would release the scores. I'd learn to play an instrument if I could recreate my favorite movie and game scores.
I can't agree more. It usually isn't too hard to find sheet music for popular movie scores, but up until recently video game music has been harder to find. I know that as far as the Halo series goes, fans have worked to re-create a lot of the score as sheet music, much of which is available on Rampancy and Google. I think that Marty may have even released a couple of pieces which you can buy/download from various places as well.
If Microsoft had succeeded in driving all other browsers out of the market in 2000, then today, we would not have any other choice and would be forced to use a browser with a dangerous security risk.
This is a completely invalid argument and I can't believe you're at +5 already. The rabid anti-Microsoft/IE crowd is out in force today I suppose.
Even if every single browser other than IE stopped development in 2000, what bearing at all does that have on potential future development? Firefox was released in 2004, some four years after your hypothetical extermination of all other browsers. Are you suggesting that if IE was the single available browser that Firefox wouldn't have been developed? I suggest the exact opposite - if IE stood alone development would have been accelerated. The funny part of your claim is that for all intents and purposes IE did drive all other browsers out of the market circa 2000 if you consider pure market share. This fact alone pretty much nulls your argument.
For you car enthusiasts, it's like saying that if Henry Ford had driven (ha ha) all other car companies out of business back in, say, 1905 with the Model T then the only choice we'd have today for a vehicle today would be a Ford. Obviously this is completely bogus.
We should applaud the recent work by the European Commission in demanding that Microsoft design their European version of Windows to allow users to choose the browser that they want
No, we shouldn't. Users of Windows were already free to choose any browser they wish to use; there was no increase in "freedom" due to the EU's meaningless requirement. You can argue that giving the user the option to remove IE from their system is good, but even that is of marginal value considering the technical aspects (only the UI is removed, the core rendering engine remains to support applications that rely on it).
If Microsoft was preventing users from downloading or installing alternative browsers I would applaud the actions of the EU. Unfortunately this isn't even close to reality and all they've really done is make using the operating system more confusing for new users. Every single modern operating system comes bundled with software and users now expect this. They want a web browser and a multimedia player out-of-the-box, both reasonable expectations. I've yet to see a situation or practical explanation which shows that requiring a "ballot box" for either application has any meaningful bearing on user freedom or choice.
Therein lies a bit of irony. Washington often claims that the USA is a freer free market than the European Union.
You do realize that in a truly free market there wouldn't be any governmental oversight, right? As soon as the government starts throwing its weight around a certain amount of freedom is lost. Sometimes this is a good thing, but don't try to twist that into being more free.
Yet, the Union is the political body which hit -- hard -- Microsoft's anticompetitive behavior.
Has Microsoft engaged in anti-competitive behavior in the past? Yes. Is their current bundling of IE and WMP with Windows anti-competitive? No.
Thanks for the suggestion, but looking at the page for that program it doesn't appear to support regular expressions. The biggest reason I usually use Flexible Renamer is it's ubiquitous support for regular expression (source files/directories, destination files/directories, grouping/matching, etc).
You may jest, but you can do a lot more, more easily, from a command line than a GUI on any platform. Even Windows. Try to
ren antique???.jpg desk???.jpg
in File Manager
In Windows: CTRL+A, F2, "desk", ENTER.
Admittedly that gives you names like "desk (01).jpg" and not "desk01.jpg" but it's close enough. If you want a significantly higher level of control, try something like Flexible Renamer (somewhat prone to crashing, but the most versatile and powerful I've found).
Lemme guess: you think hotmail doesn't datamine. You think yahoo doesn't datamine. These companies think so little of their users' privacy that they treat their users' private email as if it were their own private billboard, and you think they don't datamine.
Don't put words in my mouth -- I never even mentioned Hotmail or Yahoo. Of course they try to extract as much information as they can from their users' activities, just like Google does. My point was that Google has access to a significantly larger data pool than the other two companies do, and Google also has a reputation of privacy concerns (I'm not agreeing or disagreeing either way, just pointing it out).
I don't use Hotmail so I don't know what the other poster means by "change the contents of your email to include advertisements", but I do still use Yahoo Mail on occasion and I know that they don't. They have more advertisements than Gmail, yes, but hardly more intrusive than any other random public webpage.
As for your link, I don't see how it is even relevant. So what if they let you export data? Do you think they don't keep a copy, or at the very least a complete historical summary of it? Even if it is entirely for altruistic purposes (better data analysis algorithms or whatever), it's still in their hands.
You're saying this about Google!?. The only people that might be worse than Google in terms of data mining and user tracking is the NSA. When somebody sends you an email to Gmail, don't be confused -- Google owns that message. They're just nice enough to let you read it too.
they don't insert ads.
That's not even true. Gmail pages have plenty of text advertisements.
Don't get me wrong, I use and mostly like Gmail, but people wearing such obvious fanboy blinders towards Google's actions and motives drive me nuts.
Does any other browser provide NoScript functionality?
Great question. I (finally) mostly moved from IE to Firefox for three main reasons: Firebug, AdBlock, and NoScript. The web development and manipulation of Firebug is nice (but has been replicated largely in IE8), and there are ad blockers in IE and Chrome now as well. However, I got tired of any random website running arbitrary code on my computer and NoScript handles this pretty nicely.
I have other small addons for Firefox that are handy, but NoScript and FireBug are really the only reason I keep using Firefox. As others have said, Firefox really feels like a slow kludge sometimes. What's the point of tabbed browsing if all your other tabs lock up when loading a new tab or refreshing the content in another? Actively using multiple tabs in Firefox feels like multitasking in Windows 3.
For instance, would you rather use a one-liner that requires a 3-line comment, or a 10-liner that requires no comments? In most cases, code's readability suffers more when it's overly verbose than when it has a high comment to code ratio. Thus, I would choose to write the comment in most cases.
First, I think any time you consider writing some clever one-liner in real production code you should rethink long and hard. Is the hypothetical 6 fewer lines of code really worth it? Unless you're doing it for absolutely required performance reasons, the 6 lines of code you save won't buy you anything but the wrath of whoever has to come along in 3 years and refactor your code.
Of course you can be too verbose, but it's a much rarer problem than the alternative. Even overly verbose code is usually easier to understand, easier to maintain, and easier to refactor than that clever little one-liner. And if you're that worried about a verbose section of code, extract a method, give it a good name, and be done. Now you have both a one-liner method call that is easy to read in context and a more verbose implementation that is easier to understand and maintain in the future.
You should already be aware that most of the US Constitution and Bill of Rights has already been undermined, so I don't know how you'd be surprised that a few other words have been ignored. They have become a historic relic, not a guide to the modern legal system.
If enough people truly believe that, then it's already game over (man).
[...] Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, -- That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
Perhaps the part I find most poignant in this declaration is the line "[All] experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed." This is something politicians, corporations, and anyone in power is very well aware of -- that the "activation energy" of any kind of meaningful change in government is incredibly high (and rises with population). Unfortunately it is by this lack of available energy that allows those corrupting the purpose of government to continue to do so.
In sad effect, The People consent to malfeasance by willfully choosing inaction over action and ignorance over awareness.
Slashdot Mirror
what happens when the chip identifies humanity as a virus?
Well, if you're keeping up on the news via Slashdot you'll find out about the destruction of mankind sometime around three months after the fact.
Ah Slashdot, one of the few places where the phrase "new news" isn't redundant and "old news" isn't clichéd.
1. Read the text book, even if it's boring and even if you don't understand it, read it. You can read without understanding.
I strongly disagree with this. If you don't understand what you are reading then you won't be forming any associations or connections in your mind with regards to the material. Without at least some basic framework of understanding the information in the reading will simply not "stick" and you'll have completely forgotten it in a few hours.
2. Go to lecure and don't take notes. Instead keep your eyes on the professor's face the entire lecture. You will be amazed how much more you remember.
For some classes this might work but for most others it doesn't. In my linear algebra class I took a plethora of notes because of how densely packed the lectures were. From proofs to examples to definitions and ideas, I wrote it all down. In addition to providing a good foundation for doing the homework and studying for tests, by committing it to paper I was forced to see/hear the information, internalize it, and then redirect it back onto paper. Usually what I wrote was a condensed or summarized version often annotated with simple drawings or comments to indicate the connection with previous material. If I had just sat there staring at the professor I wouldn't have remembered anything.
3. Do the homework, even if it's repetitive and easy. It will save you study time later.
Agreed. I find it funny how many people go through courses like linear algebra or physics and expect to do well without doing any of the homework. That said, I don't care for courses where you don't have graded homework (or even hand it in) because it gives you zero feedback on your progress. There's no reason every course can't spare 10-20% of the overall grade to go towards homework credit. Even more important though, homework should be graded clearly and returned promptly. I get really pissed off after spending some 3-4 hours on an assignment and then not getting it back until 3 weeks later with nothing but a red checkmark at the top of the page.
4. Figure out the pattern your instructor uses to make test questions.
That does help, but it won't do much for you on the first exam. This also treads a little too close to "studying to get a good grade" instead of "studying to understand the material". I realize that getting good grades are important (even too important in many cases), but the whole point of being in school should be to learn. If you spend more time trying to figure out tricks to subvert an exam than you spend trying to learn you've already lost something significant.
This is a net-oriented device, afterall. If you want a full-fledged computer, then get a full-fledged computer. This sounds exactly like what a NETbook should do.
Except that netbooks are also designed to be ultra-portable. Unless you're always around an available wireless access point, not having office productivity software installed might be pretty annoying on that flight, bus trip, on the road, visiting family, etc.
If these NETbooks had some kind of always-available Internet access (say a 3G modem or something else) then I'd probably agree with you, but unfortunately lots of people use these devices while not online. I'm not sure this decision makes a lot of sense given the way the devices are actually used, their misleading name notwithstanding.
The quote in your message body and the quote in your .sig seem to go together in an oddly remarkable way. It's almost like some kind of Möbius strip of quotations.
Nice job :)
Zero point six eight seconds, sir. For an android, that is nearly an eternity.
I've always wondered at this line of dialog. From Measure of a Man we know that Data's processing speed is "60 trillion operations per second". If we assume he dedicated his full attention to her offer for the entire 0.68 seconds, that's almost 41 trillion operations required to consider and eventually reject the offer.
If Picard ever stopped to think about it, I'd imagine that might begin to worry him...
Peanuts is still being published 10 years after the creator's death!
While I don't care for Peanuts very much, I'd rather have reruns of a classic comic than the absolute drivel that Garfield has been for the last 10 years. I can only fathom that A) newspapers can't find anything else to fill that space, or B) nobody dares get rid of such a "classic" strip like Garfield. Jim Davis doesn't even try to be funny anymore.
Of course no criticism of Garfield is complete without referencing both Garfield Minus Garfield and Garkov. The saddest part is that G-G is significantly funnier than the "legitimate" strips published every day and most of the time the Markov-generated strips in Garkov are indistinguishable from what Jim Davis writes.
I suppose this means that Jim Davis fails the Turing Test.
Hmm, nope. That doesn't work either.
1) Post a message to slashdot
2) ????
3) Profit
Except in this rare case the mystery step 2 is easy to identify:
1) Post a message to slashdot
2) Include a link to your project
3) Profit!
If they are able to bypass the hypervisor and then do hack mods for the PS3 this might open up a whole new avenue for modders and interest in the platform that was not there before. In other words, this might not be a bad thing for the PS3 overall.
The problem with this is that Sony doesn't want you to buy a PS3 just so they can sell you the hardware. Sony wants you to buy a PS3 so they can sell you games, movies, downloadable content, accessories such as remotes and controllers, and other stuff like that. Large numbers of people running hacked and modded consoles that can use homebrew software and games, cracked/pirated games and downloads, and pirated BluRay movies and DVDs is the exact opposite of what Sony really wants to see happen.
As other pointed out, Halo was a huge part of the popularity of the Xbox and was, in fact, the initial reason I personally bought one. As useful as a modded Xbox is (games on the hard drive and XBMC especially), Microsoft doesn't like people modding the Xbox any more than Sony likes them modding the PS3. After all, there's a reason these companies invested what probably amounted to millions of dollars in the (doomed to fail) anti-tampering software and hardware which guards the platform.
I know it's bad form to reply to yourself, but really Slashdot? THAT is how you render an HTML ordered list? What blind, drunk monkey on an acid trip designed that stylesheet?
Of course the icing on the cake is that in the preview it was properly rendered as an ordered numeric list. WTF, Taco?
Oh, look at the name of the CSS files responsible: idlecore-tidied.css. Makes sense now I suppose. Anything to do with idle.slashdot is already horribly broken.
So, for all those tab fans, what is it about tabs that you find useful?
So there you go. In addition to just being more manageable and flexible, using tabs over spaces will help ensure the future existence of the human species on this planet.
Okay, so while the last point was in jest (mostly ;), I stand by the first four. Honestly, I've yet to see any pro-spaces people give any substantial reasons (when applied to modern computers and development tools) that spaces work better than tabs.
So, for all those space fans, what is it about spaces that you find useful?
IE market share is below 40%
Anyone who uses w3schools's browser stats as a reference for general browser usage needs to get knocked on the head a few times. That is a perfect example of biased results due to the nature of the sample.
A better number is about 62%.
I just wish the likes of Nobuo Uematsu, Martin O'Donnell, Michael Salvatori, James Horner and the like would release the scores. I'd learn to play an instrument if I could recreate my favorite movie and game scores.
I can't agree more. It usually isn't too hard to find sheet music for popular movie scores, but up until recently video game music has been harder to find. I know that as far as the Halo series goes, fans have worked to re-create a lot of the score as sheet music, much of which is available on Rampancy and Google. I think that Marty may have even released a couple of pieces which you can buy/download from various places as well.
If Microsoft had succeeded in driving all other browsers out of the market in 2000, then today, we would not have any other choice and would be forced to use a browser with a dangerous security risk.
This is a completely invalid argument and I can't believe you're at +5 already. The rabid anti-Microsoft/IE crowd is out in force today I suppose.
Even if every single browser other than IE stopped development in 2000, what bearing at all does that have on potential future development? Firefox was released in 2004, some four years after your hypothetical extermination of all other browsers. Are you suggesting that if IE was the single available browser that Firefox wouldn't have been developed? I suggest the exact opposite - if IE stood alone development would have been accelerated. The funny part of your claim is that for all intents and purposes IE did drive all other browsers out of the market circa 2000 if you consider pure market share. This fact alone pretty much nulls your argument.
For you car enthusiasts, it's like saying that if Henry Ford had driven (ha ha) all other car companies out of business back in, say, 1905 with the Model T then the only choice we'd have today for a vehicle today would be a Ford. Obviously this is completely bogus.
We should applaud the recent work by the European Commission in demanding that Microsoft design their European version of Windows to allow users to choose the browser that they want
No, we shouldn't. Users of Windows were already free to choose any browser they wish to use; there was no increase in "freedom" due to the EU's meaningless requirement. You can argue that giving the user the option to remove IE from their system is good, but even that is of marginal value considering the technical aspects (only the UI is removed, the core rendering engine remains to support applications that rely on it).
If Microsoft was preventing users from downloading or installing alternative browsers I would applaud the actions of the EU. Unfortunately this isn't even close to reality and all they've really done is make using the operating system more confusing for new users. Every single modern operating system comes bundled with software and users now expect this. They want a web browser and a multimedia player out-of-the-box, both reasonable expectations. I've yet to see a situation or practical explanation which shows that requiring a "ballot box" for either application has any meaningful bearing on user freedom or choice.
Therein lies a bit of irony. Washington often claims that the USA is a freer free market than the European Union.
You do realize that in a truly free market there wouldn't be any governmental oversight, right? As soon as the government starts throwing its weight around a certain amount of freedom is lost. Sometimes this is a good thing, but don't try to twist that into being more free.
Yet, the Union is the political body which hit -- hard -- Microsoft's anticompetitive behavior.
Has Microsoft engaged in anti-competitive behavior in the past? Yes. Is their current bundling of IE and WMP with Windows anti-competitive? No.
Wait, is this the start of the Great War? Already?
But the US hasn't even annexed Canada yet!
Thanks for the suggestion, but looking at the page for that program it doesn't appear to support regular expressions. The biggest reason I usually use Flexible Renamer is it's ubiquitous support for regular expression (source files/directories, destination files/directories, grouping/matching, etc).
You may jest, but you can do a lot more, more easily, from a command line than a GUI on any platform. Even Windows. Try to
ren antique???.jpg desk???.jpg
in File Manager
In Windows: CTRL+A, F2, "desk", ENTER.
Admittedly that gives you names like "desk (01).jpg" and not "desk01.jpg" but it's close enough. If you want a significantly higher level of control, try something like Flexible Renamer (somewhat prone to crashing, but the most versatile and powerful I've found).
Er?
Slashdot really needs a "+/- 1, Incoherent" moderation.
Lemme guess: you think hotmail doesn't datamine. You think yahoo doesn't datamine. These companies think so little of their users' privacy that they treat their users' private email as if it were their own private billboard, and you think they don't datamine.
Don't put words in my mouth -- I never even mentioned Hotmail or Yahoo. Of course they try to extract as much information as they can from their users' activities, just like Google does. My point was that Google has access to a significantly larger data pool than the other two companies do, and Google also has a reputation of privacy concerns (I'm not agreeing or disagreeing either way, just pointing it out).
I don't use Hotmail so I don't know what the other poster means by "change the contents of your email to include advertisements", but I do still use Yahoo Mail on occasion and I know that they don't. They have more advertisements than Gmail, yes, but hardly more intrusive than any other random public webpage.
As for your link, I don't see how it is even relevant. So what if they let you export data? Do you think they don't keep a copy, or at the very least a complete historical summary of it? Even if it is entirely for altruistic purposes (better data analysis algorithms or whatever), it's still in their hands.
Your email is yours, not theirs
You're saying this about Google!? . The only people that might be worse than Google in terms of data mining and user tracking is the NSA. When somebody sends you an email to Gmail, don't be confused -- Google owns that message. They're just nice enough to let you read it too.
they don't insert ads.
That's not even true. Gmail pages have plenty of text advertisements.
Don't get me wrong, I use and mostly like Gmail, but people wearing such obvious fanboy blinders towards Google's actions and motives drive me nuts.
Does any other browser provide NoScript functionality?
Great question. I (finally) mostly moved from IE to Firefox for three main reasons: Firebug, AdBlock, and NoScript. The web development and manipulation of Firebug is nice (but has been replicated largely in IE8), and there are ad blockers in IE and Chrome now as well. However, I got tired of any random website running arbitrary code on my computer and NoScript handles this pretty nicely.
I have other small addons for Firefox that are handy, but NoScript and FireBug are really the only reason I keep using Firefox. As others have said, Firefox really feels like a slow kludge sometimes. What's the point of tabbed browsing if all your other tabs lock up when loading a new tab or refreshing the content in another? Actively using multiple tabs in Firefox feels like multitasking in Windows 3.
Given your inability to properly subtract I think you've had performance problems not just in your code, but in school as well.
Uh, 10 original lines – one-liner – 3 comment lines = 6 fewer lines.
Who did you say can't subtract?
score FH_DATE_PAST_20XX 0.0
You'd probably be better off changing the rule instead of the score. Putting something like:
in your local SA config would probably be better (unless you really want to just drop the rule entirely).
That said, you'd probably be better off updating everything with sa-update, but this fix works in case you cannot or don't want to do that.
I disagree with this general statement:
First, I think any time you consider writing some clever one-liner in real production code you should rethink long and hard. Is the hypothetical 6 fewer lines of code really worth it? Unless you're doing it for absolutely required performance reasons, the 6 lines of code you save won't buy you anything but the wrath of whoever has to come along in 3 years and refactor your code.
Of course you can be too verbose, but it's a much rarer problem than the alternative. Even overly verbose code is usually easier to understand, easier to maintain, and easier to refactor than that clever little one-liner. And if you're that worried about a verbose section of code, extract a method, give it a good name, and be done. Now you have both a one-liner method call that is easy to read in context and a more verbose implementation that is easier to understand and maintain in the future.
You should already be aware that most of the US Constitution and Bill of Rights has already been undermined, so I don't know how you'd be surprised that a few other words have been ignored. They have become a historic relic, not a guide to the modern legal system.
If enough people truly believe that, then it's already game over (man).
Perhaps the part I find most poignant in this declaration is the line "[All] experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed." This is something politicians, corporations, and anyone in power is very well aware of -- that the "activation energy" of any kind of meaningful change in government is incredibly high (and rises with population). Unfortunately it is by this lack of available energy that allows those corrupting the purpose of government to continue to do so.
In sad effect, The People consent to malfeasance by willfully choosing inaction over action and ignorance over awareness.